[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

I wanted to like the original WD series, but after the first few episodes, it became a strained bore. I still watch it, mainly for laughs.

Now they have a new series, based on the same events but starting earlier in the timeline, in LA. So I'm going to give it a try. Fear the Walking Dead, first two episodes are out. Episode one, setting us up with the main characters, a typically awful, self-absorbed bunch. Husband has a shrill ex, petulant kid, and a new wife, with two really annoying step kids. The son is all of 19 and has a serious drug problem. Daughter pouts. Man, I feel for this guy, and the zombies haven't even shown up yet.

Yeah, they made sure they checked all the boxes there for the LA scene.

But they will. And that's the part that attracts me; the gradual realization that the would is coming to an awful end. How they portray that in the series will determine how much interest I have. So far, they are doing ok. Episode two

I must admit, that gradual decline into chaos is probably one of the best parts of this genre, the threads that bind society slowing coming apart as the protagonist struggles to come to terms with the new status quo.

 

gives is a glimpse of how law enforcement will handle zombies, and how the street crowds react. I can see how the zombie outbreak will go wide, with all the rioters, looters, and idiot anarchists rampaging, who will slow down the zombie infection? No one.

 

Looting is a given in this kind of situation, let's face it in a suburban US setting it doesn't take much for looters to come out. The rioters and anarchists will quickly clear up when they realise what the police are really after.

I would love it if the show had some prepper characters in it, but so far, it's mostly just this one extended family, who are very seriously not the best candidates to survive a zombie apocalypse.

Stay tuned for episode 3 next week.

That would probably make for very boring television, they'd bug out at the earliest opportunity and probably wouldn't see a zombie until a few months into the infection, and by that time you're into TWD territory.



My take on the two episodes so far.

 

Good, the gradual decline is handled quite well, although there appears to be a disturbing lack of people watching televisions and the national media outlets seem to be slow to pick up on the spate of shootings, considering how quickly Ferguson flooded the airways.
The kid at the school was probably the most accurate of todays interconnected society, he saw it coming and wanted to prepare. If anything he was perhaps the closest to a 'prepper' so far. Unfortunately, I suspect that we will not see him again, except perhaps as a roving corpse. Prepping is one thing, surviving is quite another.
The ignorance before the storm is a nice touch though, and something that hasn't really changed in over a hundred years. When Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, he commented on how the area around the initial landing point was completely oblivious to the fact that a hundred odd people had been burnt to death by a deadly alien weapon during the night.
The cast are...well they tick the demographic boxes, but I can see them beginning to grate a little, Lori style. I guess this will make it all the more satisfying when one of them gets shot or eaten...because let's face it, you know it'll happen.
It's an interesting choice to put a drug addict in the middle of it, that's a bit of maintenance that you've got to upkeep in making sure he goes through the withdrawal process authentically. They might just get fed up of this and get him eaten at some point.

The problem I think that this series will face is that at some point they're going to end up treading the same path as TWD. TWD opened a few weeks into the event, with a couple of flashbacks to it. At some point, FTWD is going to reach that time-zone and it'll either continue as a separate series to TWD, or stop. I guess it depends on what focus they want to make it, of the downfall of mankind, or another zombie survival genre.

Also...just one last thing. LA was sure hesitant to get in the National Guard, weren't they? I was expecting to see more Apache and Cobra gunships in the air, not to mention Chinooks and Huey evacuation teams for hospitals and the like. Maybe that'll come next episode.
Would be nice if they pulled out all the stops and gave us an LA version of 'Yonkers'.